[media-credit name=”Daniel Petty, The Denver Post ” align=”alignright” width=”270″][/media-credit] President Barack Obama, center, campaigns with U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Gov. John Hickenlooper at a campaign stop at the University of Colorado last September.

If you want to know Sen. Michael Bennet’s stature in Washington, check out the Denver Democrat’s seat at Monday’s inauguration of President Barack Obama.

An interesting feature in The New York Times lets browsers know who was seated where. Zoom in on Michael Bennet’s name and you’ll find the senator in one of the better seats.

BTW, the guy in a white cowboy hat in the picture, the one whose face can’t be seen, isn’t U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar but U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.

Colorado’s senior senator, Democrat Mark Udall, is seated a few rows behind Bennet, next to his first cousin, U.S. Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico. And seated two rows behind them is actress Eva Longoria.

[media-credit name=”RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post ” align=”alignnone” width=”495″][/media-credit] Chantel Blunk, wife of Jonathan Blunk, waits on the tarmac at Denver International Airport in July as her husband’s body is about to be loaded into a plane to fly to Reno for his full military funeral. Blunk, a five-year U.S. Navy veteran, was killed during a July 20 shooting rampage at a movie theater in Aurora — the sixth-most searched news topic on Yahoo! this year.

“Election 2012″ was the most searched news topic in 2012 with the theater shooting in Aurora in July coming in at No. 6, according to Yahoo!

Yahoo! this morning released its Year in Review, the annual look back at the top stories and trends of the year based on the daily search habits of millions of people.

He’s the toast of the pundit world, the whiz kid who nailed it this election, the Chuck Norris of Numbers, correctly predicting every state that would support Barack Obama for president despite a wave of “Nate Hate.”

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, left, Gov. John Hickenlooper and U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar celebrate after President Barack Obama was predicted the winner over Mitt Romney at the Colorado Democrats’ election party Tuesday. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)Source: AP

Democrat Michael Bennet was an early supporter of Barack Obama, signing on in early 2007 when many Colorado bold-face name types were supporting Hillary Clinton.

Bennet, then Denver’s school superintendent and now a U.S. senator, relentlessly stumped for Obama, thought Mitt Romney’s choice of a running mate was a disaster and on Tuesday celebrated a victory that came as no surprise to him.

“I think the Washington Republicans — and it’s not everybody, but there is a group of them — who have a lot of influence over the policy positions that are taken don’t represent Colorado Republicans, much less Democrats or independents,” he said. “I think that contortion is one of the reasons the president won.”

President Barack Obama celebrates after delivering his acceptance speech in Chicago on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012. Obama swept to re-election, forging history again by transcending a slow economic recovery and the high unemployment which haunted his first term to beat Republican Mitt Romney.

Back in August, University of Colorado political science professors Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry won national attention for projecting an Electoral College romp for Mitt Romney based on a model relying heavily on state-level economic factors such as unemployment data and changes in personal income.

On Wednesday — after the professors incorrectly forecast that Romney would sweep the battleground states that ended up carrying Obama to an easy victory — it was time for a reckoning.

“The model was wrong,” Bickers conceded. “Sure, that’s a mea culpa I suppose. I’ve argued everywhere from the beginning that polls and prediction models don’t vote. This gives you the historical conditions, provides a kind of baseline for information in interpreting what might happen. In that sense, I still think it’s a useful tool. It didn’t get the correct outcome but it does give you the historical context.”

If Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight blog is biggest winner of the election prognosticators by nailing all 50 states with his poll averages and “secret sauce,” then Bickers and Berry are among the goats.

And the battleground results truly proved their undoing. The CU profs wrongly put Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Hampshire, Iowa, Virginia and Ohio in Romney’s column (and Florida, in which Obama has a lead). They also had Minnesota — which Obama won by 8 percentage points — going for Romney.

The presidential campaign in Colorado this year has at times seemed almost geologic in its duration.

Forty-four candidate events. Sixty million dollars in television ad spending. A population bigger than that of Fort Collins in attendance at rallies.

And, yet, as this morning’s story on the final Denver Post poll of 2012 details, it has all been a zero-sum game: the presidential race in Colorado is still basically tied, same as it was in the Post’s first poll, same as it was a year ago before the general election campaign officially began.

For those interested in exploring the poll in more details, we can now provide you with the full crosstabs for the survey. Here they are.

You can also compare the results and the details to our previous polls in September and October.

Would David Axelrod still get this much attention without his moustache? He thinks he won’t have to find out. (Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post)

Today’s story on get-out-the-vote efforts by the Obama and Romney camps underscores the urgency of the campaigns as they barrel through the last week before Election Day.

But it also shows how close the race still is in Colorado. As of this morning, the poll-tracking website Real Clear Politics shows Colorado as one of only two swing states where the average of recent polls places the margin within a single percentage point. At times this week, the site has put Colorado at an even tie — the closest swing state in the country.

This Colorado claustrophobia — plus a national polling average margin that Real Clear puts at a microscopic 0.1 percent — brings greater intrigue to a seemingly innocuous statement made by President Barack Obama’s campaign strategist David Axelrod during a conference call with reporters earlier this week.

The joke in the newsroom is that a story written tomorrow about President Obama’s GOTV effort would likely begin, “OMG, OMG, OMG.”

That’s because actor Jon Hamm, star of Mad Men, is one of the Hollywood hotshots rallying Colorado voters for Obama’s re-election effort. Other actors include Laurence Fishburne and Zachary Quinto.

According to the Obama campaign: Fishburne will attend events in Aurora and Denver (including hooking up with Denver Mayor Michael Hancock); Hamm will join actors Jennifer Westfeldt and Stephanie March in Lakewood, Littleton and Denver;and Quinto will join Rachael Leigh Cook, Ben McKenzie, Bryan Greenberg and Nick Zano to highlight the importance of the youth vote during a stop at CU-Boulder.

Is President Barack Obama waving goodbye or hello to a second term? Four new polls in Colorado offer contrasting takes. (Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post)

Barely a week out from the only poll that matters in the election, four new polls in Colorado show that the presidential race is too close to call — except when they show it isn’t.

Three polls released Thursday by what critics would charge are Democratic-friendly pollsters show President Barack Obama leading in Colorado by at least three percentage points. It’s the fourth poll, though, that might have Team Obama sweating.

The poll from NBC News, the Wall Street Journal and the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, shows the presidential race tied in Colorado, 48-48. The same poll showed Obama with a 5-point lead in September over GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Only 2 percent of voters in the poll are undecided or considering changing their mind.

What’s worrisome from an Obama perspective is that Obama is now losing among suburban Denver voters and independents in the poll. His lead with women has slipped from 14 points to 7. It was within those demographic groups that Obama built his victory in Colorado last election.

Only strong support among Latinos and in liberal centers is keeping Obama hanging on, according to the poll, which hit 1,128 likely voters. Its sample is divided 34 percent Democrats, 33 percent Republicans, 32 percent independents, the same split as the September poll.

“Romney’s had a better October than any of the other months in the campaign. We do see a change in his favorability,” Marist director Lee Miringoff told NBC News. “He’s no longer upside down. That’s leveled off. He’s doing better with independent voters, closed the gender gap, and doing better with women. What that means for a place like Colorado — it is extremely close right now, but it is clearly a state that could go either way.”

The three other polls offer more reason for optimism for the Obama campaign.

Lynn Bartels thinks politics is like sports but without the big salaries and protective cups. The Washington Post's "The Fix" blog has named her one of Colorado's best political reporters and tweeters.

Joey Bunch has been a reporter for 28 years, including the last 12 at The Denver Post. For various newspapers he has covered the environment, water issues, politics, civil rights, sports and the casino industry.